Two People … Eighteen Wheels … Seven Continents

Siri, Call Me Master

The words floated above the roar of the diesel engine and settled in the tractor cab.

“Siri.” In MacGyver’s best ‘I want something from you voice’, he asked the iPhone 5, “Call me Master.”

“There is no word match,” Siri deadpanned.

“I gotta get one woman in my life to call me that,” said MacGyver whose harem now includes Black Beauty, Bellina, Siri and Moi. “And it ain’t gonna be you.”

Siri is an Apple application, introduced with the last iPhone update, 4S, known as the intelligent personal assistant. Talk to her and she takes care of chores, such as updating your schedule, sending reminders and answering dumb questions.

MacGyver pulled off a “Best Of” this morning. He has been promising me for months that while I had to wait, I “would be the first to have Apple’s iPhone 5. Just like I’ve given you my No Bag Lady guarantee.”

Last week, the first day the phone became available he set his alarm for five o’clock in the morning, ordering the phone while I slept beside him. It arrived in Florida yesterday where he arranged to have it immediately transferred to a FedEx pack and overnighted to Omaha, Nebraska, on our current routing, which amazingly has a 24 hour location to pick up packages.

He checked the iPad and found that the Target across the street had a loading bay. I drove in, he hopped out and ran across the street, returning in less than two minutes.

Voila iPhone 5.

“I’ll be in the IT department setting this up,” he said as he crawled into the sleeper berth and I put Black Beauty into drive.

The first phone call was to Verizon to activate the service, which will cost us an astronomical $180 a month BEFORE taxes and ‘other surcharges and fees’ for unlimited texts, shared data between two phones and a WiFi card.

But it was the $30 “discounted” upgrade charge that miffed him. Verizon noted online on our account that our current Samsung phones qualify us for a ‘discounted’ upgrade.

Phone upgrades, were, once upon a time not long ago, FREE, every two years with a two-year contract. Now customers get a discounted upgrade with a two-year contract PLUS a $30 fee.

Technology in trucking has gone, in the four years since we've been driving, from zero to 60! We arrived at Schneider school having used a GPS since 2000 — I swear MacGyver had Magellan's second unit off the assembly line, it was always freezing up — and a laptop.We fully intended to use technology to help us become truckers. But almost no one else had a GPS. We heard "I'm old school" and "I like to hold a map" a lot. We had almost no out-of-route, unusual for newbie drivers, Schneider tracked everything, because of the GPS.Then two years ago I heard one old school trucker tell another old school trucker that his GPS is the only equipment he has, that if it broke he'd go straight to the Pilot and replace it.GPSs and Google Earth and Google Maps are ESSENTIAL in trucking because in four years directions to a location have gone the way of the dodo bird. Everyone says: you're a truck driver, you don't need directions, use the GPS. Wellno GPS is perfect, maps are not up to date, roads are closed, routings are changed, there is no replacement for someone at the location saying use the second entrance not the first.Yes, the toys are great — we couldn't be out on the road without them, keeping in touch with people, shopping, watching moves, doing banking, running the business — we have them all and they have become essential, another cost of doing business.Thanks for reading, Julie.

MASTER??Not MOST HIGH EXCELLANCY….RULER OF ALL THAT IS GOOD….BOSSI would settle for HOW CAN I HELP YOU. Which is much better than WHAT DO YOU WANT NOW!!!$180.00/MO. IS CHEAPER THAN A …..I AM WAITING FOR IROBOT & DISNEY to fullfill what the two (at least two) movies could not bring to market ( hello amazon/google). Which would be vastly superior to"a voice" 🙂